Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: Technically, Open Source won. Politically, it lost. Every megacorporation is now ...

Technically, Open Source won. Politically, it lost.

Every megacorporation is now built on top of free software. But they managed to make it effectively proprietary by hiding their code behind web interfaces.

When publicly distributed, the open-source code is hidden behind layers of indirection bypassing any packaging/integration effort, relying instead on virtualisation and downloading dependencies on the fly.

Thanks to those strategies, corporations could benefit from open source code without any consequence. The open source code is, anyway, mostly hosted and developed on proprietary platforms.

Due to the original open-source utopia paradigm, every time developers push free code on Github, they feel like they're contributing to the commons.

But, effectively, they're pushing code into production in hundreds of exploitive corporate projects.

When a problem occurs, per corporate tradition, pressure and blame fall on the maintainer. Even if that maintainer is not on the payroll.

paying the contributor/maintainer a dime is not the solution. It worsen the situation. It acknowledges the responsibility of the aforementioned maintainer and legitimises the exploitation.

We need to remember that most (if not all) free software is provided, "without liability". That rule should be enforced. We should not care about corporations. If there was no support contract prior hand, let them burn. Trying to force corporations to pay the maintainer is like trying to force landlords to pay firefighters only if their house is burning. Or agreeing that a factory should give a small tip to volunteers cleaning the river it is polluting.

Paid and unpaid open source developers are pressed into providing a support they never promised in the first time. So they ask companies for mandatory contributions, something they explicitly refused when they licensed their code.

If you care about the commons, you should put your work under a strong copyleft license like the AGPL. That way, we will get back to building that commons we lost because of web services. If someone ever complains that a web service broke because of your AGPL code, reply that the whole web service should be under the AGPL too.

In the long term, the root causes of most of our problems are the monopolistic corporations. Without them, we would not have this discussion.

There’s a generational divide here. Brilliant coders now on the market or in the free software space have never known a world without Google, Facebook and Github. Their definition of software is "something running in the browser". Even email is, for them, a synonym for the proprietary messaging system called "Gmail" or "Outlook". They contribute to FLOSS on Github while chatting on Slack or Discord, sharing specifications on Google Drive and advertising their project on Twitter/X. They also often have an iPhone and a Mac because "shiny". They cannot imagine an alternative world where monopolies would not be everywhere. They feel that having nice Github and Linkedin profiles where they work for free is the only hope they have to escape unemployment. Who can blame them? They cannot imagine a world without monopolies. They don’t search, they Google. They don’t shop online, they go on Amazon. They don’t read a book, they read a rented version of a book on a Kindle. They don’t take a coffee, they have a Starbucks. For them, politics is only a source of conflicts, a naughty word.

As they start to understand that they are exploited by those omnipotent deities, they see only one way to make it acceptable: ask, through one of those deities (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), to be paid. They understand that they are two classes of coders in the world: those who are exploited without being paid and those who are paid to be exploited. A bit or even more in some cases. While a few hands keep all the power.

What elderly should teach them, is that there are many alternatives. We can live without Google, Facebook Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. We can write code which is not on Github, which doesn’t run on an Amazon server and which is not displayed in a Google browser. We should also insist that every piece of technology is, by essence, political. That you cannot understand technology without understanding the people. And you cannot understand people without understanding politics. Every choice you made has an impact on the world.

The lesson we learned is harsh: we can never trust corporations with anything. They destroyed our oceans, our atmosphere and our politics. There’s no reason to trust them with our software, our privacy and our daily lives.

@ploum@mamot.fr @programming@a.gup.pe

https://ploum.net/2024-07-01-opensource_sustainability.html